Since this is a “religious” blog, I’ll be discussing — briefly, for me — how my faith relates to experiments using CERN’s Large Hadron Collider and science in general.

Making Sense

An ardent Christian once told me that the sun goes around Earth, ‘because the Bible says so.’ He was right: assuming that Joshua 10:12–13 and Job 9:7 are utterly devoid of metaphor and written with a contemporary literalist’s viewpoint.

I don’t make that assumption. I don’t ‘put my faith in’ science either. Putting knowledge, or anything else, in God’s place is a very bad idea. (Catechism, 2113–2114)

On the other hand, fearing knowledge doesn’t make sense. Not to me. Studying this universe and developing new tools are part of being human. (Catechism, 2292–2295)

One of the cardinals, Nikolaus von Schönberg, urged Copernicus “to communicate this discovery of yours to scholars….”

Copernicus had pretty much finished writing “De revolutionibus orbium coelestium” by 1532, but insisted on delaying publication until after his death. There’s a story behind that, it’s not the usual one, and that’s yet another topic, for another day.

Copernicus died in 1542. Pope Gregory XIII used Copernican tables in his calendar reform — there’s a story or two about that — and Galileo got into trouble with an Inquisition. He was convicted of being insufficiently Aristotelian in 1616, and a legend was born.

Plutarch wrote that Cleanthes, who saw the sun as divine, opposed the heliocentric view. Cleanthes jokingly told Aristarchus that he should be charged with impiety.

Ménage messed up the grammar. In his translation the joke was a flat-out accusation. The translation came shortly after the Galileo and Bruno trials. I talked about European politics last week. (March 17, 2017)

They’re “laws” in the sense that they describe how the universe works under specific conditions. Newton didn’t invent motion or gravity, of course. What he did was describe, mathematically, how both work.

Scientific theories can be tested, which brings me to the early 20th century.

Starting in 1929, Jan Oort measured positions and motions of stars. He said that our sun wasn’t the center of this galaxy. He was right about that.

He also noticed that estimates of the total mass of our galaxy’s stars, gas, and other observable matter, couldn’t account for the observed rotation speeds. There isn’t enough observable mass, and it’s not in the right places.

One of the less-improbable explanations for Oorts ‘missing mass’ is dark matter.

Dark Matter?

“Dark matter” is stuff that doesn’t absorb, reflect or emit light or other electromagnetic radiation. That makes detecting it really hard.

Scientists have known about one sort of dark matter, neutrinos, since 1956.

Neutrinos are subatomic particles with no electric charge. They have mass, probably, but it’s tiny even compared to other subatomic particles. Since they’re electrically neutral, magnetism won’t affect neutrinos.

But the weak subatomic force does affect them, and so does gravity. They’re produced during radioactive decay and nuclear reactions, like what happens in our sun’s core.

We may learn that dark matter isn’t what causes the effects we’ve observed.

Other explanations include mass in other dimensions, with gravity having an effect across all dimensions. This might explain why gravity is such a very weak force. It takes moon- and planet-size concentrations of mass to produce serious gravity fields.

Maybe we’re looking at defects in quantum fields. Or maybe Newton’s and Einstein’s descriptions of gravity need another major tweak, or Unruh radiation horizons generate inertia.

Dark matter is mostly theoretical at this point. Other explanations are even more so.1

Quarks come in six flavors: up, down, strange, charm, bottom, and top. Gell-Mann got the spelling of “quarks” from a line in “Finnegans Wake.” I’m not entirely sure how he got the “kwork” sound. Zweig called the particles “aces,” but hardly anyone calls them that now.

I’m also not sure why many scientists stopped using pretentious names for new stuff in the ’60s, but I rather like the change of style.

Baryons, Quarks, and Empedocles

If an astronomer says something is a baryon, it’s probably matter that’s not dark matter.

If an physicist says something is a baryon, it’s a hadron that’s not a meson.

The physicist’s baryons have 3 quarks.

Mesons have 2 quarks, more accurately a quark and an antiquark. Squarks are hypothetical particles that may or may not exist. I made an unnecessarily-long but incomplete set of links to more than you need to know about this stuff.2

We’ve learned quite a bit since Empedocles said there are four elements: earth, water, air, and fire. That’s not an entirely-inaccurate way to describe the four states of matter: solid, liquid, gas, and plasma.

“The next couple of years will be make or break for the next big theory in physics called supersymmetry – SUSY for short. It might make way for a rival idea which predicts the existence of a ‘fifth force’ of nature.

The Standard Model of particle physics has been around for about a half-century. It does a pretty good job of describing the electromagnetic, weak, and strong nuclear interactions, plus subatomic particles like photons, quarks, and neutrinos.

But it doesn’t include gravity, or a dark matter particle that fits what we’ve observed so far.

Supersymmetry relates bosons, that have integer-valued spin; and fermions, with half-integer spin. Each particle from one group would be associated with a particle from the other, known as its superpartner. The difference between their spins would be a half-integer.

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About Brian H. Gill

I'm a sixty-something married guy with six kids, four surviving, in a small central Minnesota town. I mostly write and make digital art. I'm only interested in three things: that which exists within the universe; that which exists beyond; and that which might exist.

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